I must admit I didn’t think I’ve ever be singing the praises of a piece of software with AI (machine/automatic learning) but I am slowly coming round to the fact that TOPAZ might actually have something here.
I waited until a suitable moment (A: I had some spare dosh, and B: there was a VERY attractive offer on…) and ‘invested’ in the TOPAZ photo suite (Photo AI which is the entire suite, with individual standalone programs for sharpening, removing noise and over-sizing.)
The following images show what can be achieved with no unpleasant bending or exercise whatsoever… (« …wrestle poodles and win » Viv Stanshall)
In truth there’s not a HUGE difference, and certainly nothing at this scale will show up (click on the little ‘+’ button and enlarge it as much as it allows) but the noise (albeit only ISO 200) has been radically ‘smoothed’ and if I were attempting a very large print, it would be the way to go.
Here’s another example:
I’m not much of a ‘post treatment’ junkie – principally ‘cos I’m not very good at it – but I can imagine this software coming into it’s own when I need to produce very large copies of my images. The ‘over-sizing’ program Gigapixel AI makes a very good job (I’ve only tested the 2x computations) of the images – keen to try a couple of images at large scale with and without the software changes, just to see how the quality stands up.
One of the risks of ‘AI’ is that the smoothing applied smooths to the point of creating weird artefacts which pollute the image – training is going to be necessary here…